A PUBLIC-DATA EXPLORER · 30-CITY FIXED COHORT

US Cities through time

Political lean, reported crime, and economic outcomes — side by side, not cause and effect.

Correlation is not causation. Presidential voting is not municipal party control. Most voting and economic figures below are county proxies; crime figures describe police jurisdictions. These are not identical populations. No causal or partisan conclusion is estimated.
30largest cities, 2024 cohort
1976–2024presidential election observations
1975–2024violent crime, with gaps
1989–2024income & poverty, with gaps
YEAR IN FOCUS2024
197519851995200520152024
Election jumps:

Exact-year observations only. No filling in missing years, no carrying an election result into the next year. Play updates all comparisons; the vertical playhead highlights the same year on city timelines.

THE SAME 30 CITIES · EVERY YEAR

Compare the selected year

Each dot represents one city label, not one uniform geographic unit. Hover for the county and police jurisdiction; click a dot to explore that city.

City locator · scrub the year to change the dots

Dots locate Census places, not county or police boundaries. Colors describe the named county proxy or agency, not city-proper estimates.

Lower Higher · Gray = no observation · Gold outline = selected city. Hover or focus a dot for its value; click or press Enter to explore. Schematic state outlines; no shaded data districts.

Voting & reported violent crime

X: Democratic share of all presidential votes, county proxy (%). Y: agency violent offenses per 100,000. Same selected year only.

Voting & household income

X: Democratic share of all presidential votes, county proxy (%). Y: county median household income in 2024 dollars. Not adjusted for local living costs.

Watch cities rise and fall

Sorted by measured value in the exact selected year; missing cities are listed separately. A rank is not a measure of government performance.

All 30 cities: values & geographic units for this year
City (2024 rank)Voting & economy: county proxyDem / Rep / Other %Violent / 100k
agency		Property / 100k
agency		Median income
2024 dollars, county		Poverty %
county
ONE CITY LABEL · MULTIPLE GEOGRAPHIES

Explore a city over time

Coverage & series links for this city

Presidential voting · county proxy

● Democratic● Republican● OtherShare of all votes cast (%) · election points only

Reported violent crime · agency

Offenses per 100,000 agency residents. Revised rape definition from 2013; reporting transition from 2021.

Reported property crime · agency

Offenses per 100,000 agency residents. This build starts in 2016, not 1975.

Median household income · county

2024 dollars using national CPI-U. County median, not city median or GDP per person.

People in poverty · county

Census SAIPE estimated percentage of all ages below the poverty threshold. Early missing years remain gaps.

All five timelines use the same 1975–2024 horizontal scale. Lines connect adjacent annual observations only; no line crosses a missing year. Election points are not interpolated. The income/poverty estimates have sampling/model uncertainty not drawn here.

READ BEFORE DRAWING CONCLUSIONS

About, sources & limitations

What this can — and cannot — tell you

This explorer shows descriptive changes and cross-city associations. It does not test whether political lean causes crime or prosperity. Demographics, industry mix, national recessions, population shifts, policing practices, reporting changes, state and federal policy, and many other factors move these series. Reverse causation and time lags are possible. Voters are not all residents, and presidential voting is not the same thing as local elected leadership.

    A fixed cohort, not a complete national census

    The 30 largest incorporated places in the Census Vintage 2024 July 1 population ranking are included, without dropping cities for inconvenient outcomes. It is a fixed present-day cohort, not the 30 largest in every historical year. New York through Baltimore are included. Data completeness varies by city and year; no values have been invented.

    Important gaps

    • This is not a complete 50-year matched panel. The slider spans 1975–2024; presidential observations are 1976–2024 election years; income and poverty start in 1989 with early gaps.
    • Crime year 2020 has not been harmonized in this build. The 2016 city data come from Table 6 (the city table that year), and 2017–2019 from Table 8; headers were verified instead of assuming table numbering was constant. Property crime is included for 2016–2019 and 2021–2024 where reported.
    • Recent crime coverage omits Jacksonville (Florida reporting gaps). Other agency-years can also be absent; see the city coverage panel and CSV. No latest-year value is silently replaced with an older value.
    • The revised rape definition (2013), NIBRS transition (2021), agency boundary changes, and changing reporting completeness prevent simple like-for-like interpretation. Los Angeles 2024 is explicitly noncomparable. Crime rates use FBI agency populations, not Census place populations; the Marshall Project notes that its original 2015 calculation used a prior-year population estimate.
    • Income uses national inflation adjustment, not a city-specific price index. SAIPE estimation methodology changed over time. Poverty percentages do not directly measure wealth, and household income is not a measure of total economic production.
    • Most city labels use a primary county proxy for both voting and economy. This includes suburbs and may omit parts of the city. New York is the most substantial mismatch: Manhattan county voting/income versus citywide crime. These are exploratory comparisons, not matched-geography estimates.

    Sources & rights

    All datasets below were opened for this build. “As of” is the compilation/retrieval date, not the observation year. Original-source rights remain in place; no blanket open license is asserted for third-party repositories without one.

    Reproducible files

    Download the compiled city-year CSV · Download methods & source metadata

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